


The Keepers of the Flame of The Ecumenical Good

by eldritcher



Series: Pandemic [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Asexuality, Dark, Family, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Humor, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 10:07:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29665644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: Draco doesn't mean to carry on with the family tradition of giving Voldemort sanctuary. Still, it is a matter of The Ecumenical Good.
Relationships: Delphi & Draco Malfoy, Draco Malfoy & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Draco Malfoy & Voldemort
Series: Pandemic [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137872
Kudos: 9





	The Keepers of the Flame of The Ecumenical Good

**Author's Note:**

> Written from Draco's perspective.

_Wiltshire, 1995_

"What are you listening to?" 

"Mum, hello," I shifted on my bed to make room for her. 

The lamps had not been lit yet. In the faint twilight, Mum's pale face wore tiredness and concern in equal measure. She propped herself against the headboard and coaxed my head into her lap, absently raking through my hair and humming verses of a song I knew.

_"Faster than a bullet, Terrifying scream_  
_Enraged and full of anger, He's half man and half machine."_

Voldemort was on a rampage somewhere. Papa had accompanied him, in a vain bid to curb his worst. 

" _Painkiller_ ," I identified. "Mum, you hate Judas Priest!"

"Severus ruined your musical palate with the dystopian clatter he inflicted on you as a child," Mum muttered. Then, she sighed, saying, "Lucius would write to me of the songs you were fond of. I listened to them too, again and again."

The Manor was a lonely place. She lived alone, but for the House Elves, since 1981. 

Papa had taken me with him, first to France, and then to Belfast, where we made a home with his mistress of many years. Wallis was an American divorcee Papa had met on a cruise as a teenager. 

Severus had often visited us there, in that terraced home Wallis and Papa kept at Belfast. He would bring me Muggle music CDs and had helped me set up a CD player. His music preferences were British hard rock and metal, with a dash of punk. Exposed to those from a young age, I had begun to like them too. Wallis, in dismay, had begun forcing upon me her classical music tapes. So I knew both Holst and Pink Floyd. 

In the winter holidays, when I came to the Manor, Mum would play old Muggle R&B and Country songs on the gramophone, the music of her childhood. 

Mum was an unusual woman. As a child, I had not noticed her traits. As a teenager, whose first and last thought was of sex, and of worrying about why I did not worry about it as my peers did, I began to see how she was disinclined to all matters sexual and romantic. _Asexual_ , Wallis had explained to me, last winter, when I had hesitantly asked. 

I visited Mum for Christmas, and stayed with Papa and Wallis over the summers. 

All that had changed, after the Tournament, when Harry Potter's blood had brought Voldemort back. Mum had taken him in. Papa had placed Wallis under a Fidelius, and had hastened to Wiltshire, refusing to allow Mum to bear the brunt of Voldemort's insanity. They might not have been husband and wife, in the way the world portrayed them, but they loved each other as family. 

Both Papa and Mum had asked me to stay with Wallis for Christmas. I had gone to Wiltshire, defying their wishes. 

I wished I had gone to Belfast, because Papa's nervous anxiety whenever Voldemort was around me was frightening to behold. 

"Why aren't you scared of him, Mum?" I asked softly, looking up at her careworn features. 

Half-man, half-machine, enraged and full of anger, without reason or heart. I had begun to respect Potter after he came back with Diggory's body, shaken but still standing without his head bowed. 

"My father killed my mother," Mum said venomously. "Ours was a home of the blues, where a man hated his bed-ridden wife for having given him three daughters and no sons. Dromeda left us when she turned fifteen. Bella was at school. I was there, to see it all."

The Blacks, Papa would often say ruefully, were an insane and unstable lot. Mum, Papa held, was the best of them. 

I knew this story. Papa had told me one summer night, when I had turned thirteen. It had been a story. In Mum's recounting, it was a life, dark and troubled. 

He-" she cleared her throat. "I angered my father often, in the years that followed. It came to violence. In a strike of self defense, I killed him with an outlash of uncontrolled magic. The House Elf, furious and grieving for her master, came to kill me. Voldemort saved me and brought me here. He covered my magic with his own, so that I would not be condemned to Azkaban as a child. In the years that followed, he was my northstar, fraying in sanity, unravelling of himself with each passing day, and yet the only constant in my life." 

This had been her lot, to have been among family who were crueler than a madman that was hell-bent on killing a mere boy. 

"I am sorry, Mum," I said softly, bringing our joined hands to my heart. "I will protect you."

If Potter could return from a graveyard, brave and bloodied and unbroken, I could protect my mother. 

"My Draco," she said, overwhelmed, tearful, and pressed a kiss to my brow. Then, turning wistful, she wished, "I wanted you away from this place where only ghosts walk."

That decided it. 

\----

When midnight drew, after even the House Elves had retired, I gathered up my courage and went to the east wing. 

Grandfather's old quarters. Mum had left it untouched after his death in 1981. A museum, I had thought often, as a child, playing hide and seek with the House Elves whenever I had visited the Manor. 

It was no museum. It was a mausoleum. 

I heard the rustle of parchments from Grandfather's study. 

Freezing where I stood, I wondered if it was too late to turn back. Potter, I told myself. Think of Potter. He had come back from a graveyard, bloodied and unbroken. 

Squaring my shoulders, I clutched my wand tight in my hand, wished I had worn something more substantial than my plain woollen sleep-clothes, and walked into the study. 

Voldemort was seated at the desk. He looked up from his correspondence and put his quill down, taking care not to smear ink on parchment. So he knew deliberation, at least in this. 

I licked my lips, and wished I had not undertaken this fool's errand, and trudged on nevertheless, thinking about how stupidly brave Potter was.

"Hello, my name is Draco."

Potter had spoken of a monster. A monster's eyes could not hold the dizzying array of emotion Voldemort's gaze showcased in succession. 

"Hello, Draco. Lucius won't be pleased," he settled for saying. 

"Thank you for saving my Mum."

He rose from his seat. Flinching, I nearly took a step back, before thinking about Potter and standing my ground. His expression fell, a sliver, before he composed himself and sat down again, and placed his hands, palms-up, flat on the desk as if to signal his intention not to harm.

"I will not harm Narcissa's son," he said quietly, and the vow in his words was absolute. 

"My Mum-" I cleared my throat. "I am not going back to school. I am going to stay here and protect her." My voice was thin and high, as a frightened girl's, but I carried on. In for a penny, in for a pound, as Severus was fond of saying. "I have an O in Defense against the Dark Arts!"  
  
I had an E. O was reserved for Harry Potter, who had to his credit all manners of insane feats.

"I know when you lie," Voldemort said, and was that amusement in his tone? 

Flushing, I hurried to emphasize, "I am staying. To protect her." 

"Have you perchance informed your parents of this decision?"

I scowled. I would cross that bridge when I got there! 

A chessboard and pieces came flying to the desk, and neatly arranged themselves to a fresh game. The pieces were of ivory, and the board of the same mahogany that the desk was wrought from. My grandfather's, I knew. 

I was passing decent at chess, even if I was not Ronald Weasley. I used to play with Wallis for hours on end during the summers. Keeping a wary eye on Voldemort, I moved to the desk and took a seat. 

"Black," I said. 

He nodded and made the first move. 

He had not played in years, I swiftly realized. And his moves showed little strategy. If plans he had, they shifted and swirled as smoke unrealized, from move to move. 

Surprised, I looked up at him, to see him fiercely focused on the game. The frustration in his eyes was plain.

His mind. He could not command it still, no more than he could command the path of smoke on the wind. 

Potter had called him a monster. Papa had called him mad. Papa was right. 

I knew then why Mum had taken him in. Her old savior, her childhood's constant, the sole parental influence she had known in her life, insane and mourning his mind. 

"We can stop," I offered softly, seeing how he struggled. 

"You remind me of her," he murmured, and a sliver of humor quirked his lips. "I would play with Narcissa, again and again, and I did not win a single game after 1971."

I was not Severus, to make lightning-swift leaps of logic, but I knew instinctively then why Voldemort had asked me to play this game with him.

He had wanted me to see this. He had wanted me to see the difference between a madman and a monster. 

"You are family to Mum," I said clumsily, hating the quaver in my voice. He went preternaturally still at my words. 

Papa was confident that once Aunt Bella was returned to us, she could rein in Voldemort's worst impulses. I did not share his confidence, knowing what she had done to the Longbottoms, but what did I know? 

What I knew was that Mum had chosen to give Voldemort sanctuary, and that she meant to protect him. I refused to leave her alone with him.

"Welcome home," I managed. 

The Black King on the board shimmered as smoke, before turning into a miniature of Rob Halford, the Judas Priest frontman, complete with leather and studs. That shocked a peal of laughter from me, before I could compose myself, and I reached out to pat the bald head of the statue, only to be bitten lightly. 

"You know the music of Judas Priest?" I asked, bewildered. 

"I have seen your mind," Voldemort said lightly. I ought to be frightened by his power. Oddly, I felt reassured, and picked up the statue conjured and transfigured for me. 

A sharp rap on the door broke our quiet. 

"Draco, go to bed!" 

Papa. 

I scurried away, but not before calling out a " _Goodnight_!" to Voldemort. 

* * *

_Glasgow, 1996_

The war was long drawn out. Voldemort left the field to Aunt Bella and Papa, and the strategy to Mum. He vanished, and I was sure that he had left the country. 

"Get out of here, Draco!" Severus muttered, flinging himself into a duel with Alastor Moody, neatly throwing a shield to divert the Bone Shattering Curse Moody attacked me with. 

Severus was on Dumbledore's side, but when we encountered each other, he would protect me and heal me up if I had been harmed. It was not the first time he had turned on one of his own to buy me time to escape. 

I had given up making sense of him. 

"Draco!"

It was young Greengrass. Cursing, I went to her aid, where she was dueling with Shacklebolt. Even trained by Aunt Bella, I could scarce hold my own against the experienced Auror. Where was Aunt Bella when you needed her? She had caught notice of someone early in the skirmish, and had set off in hot pursuit. I hoped dearly that it was not Potter who had grabbed her attention. 

Shacklebolt's tripping jinx caught me, and I fell on the green with my wand flying away from my hands. 

"These are children!" Severus was shouting at Moody and Shacklebolt, attempting to talk sense into them. "We should see where Bella ran off to!" 

A clocktower exploded a mile away, raining concrete and stones upon the streets. 

"I think we have found Mrs. Lestrange," Shacklebolt said in his deep voice, and Apparated away with a last Jelly-Legs thrown at me. 

Moody snarled, but Severus stood between him and us. Trusting Severus, I crawled to where the Greengrass girl lay in a puddle of mud and blood. There was a strange magic on her. I jerked away when my healing spell rebounded.

"Foolish girl!" Severus muttered, casting spell after spell, and unveiling a bump that had been hidden on the girl's belly by magic. "Draco, did you get her with child?"

"I was not sleeping with her!" I exclaimed, horrified by his easy accusation. It was Severus. He knew me! 

As Mum, I had little inclination to sex or romance.

"War does funny things to your head," Severus explained briskly, without an apology. He had saved me again. I decided to forgive him his callous insinuation. 

Severus was frighteningly pragmatic. He made me assist him in his battlefield midwifery, even if I turned queasy at the sight of labor. A baby, bawling, and hastily silenced with a spell, was plunked into my arms. 

"Severus-" I said weakly, weeping. 

Buildings exploded in the distance, in a zig-zag manner. Aunt Bella was more than capable of holding her own against the Aurors. In battle, nobody matched her ruthlessness and skill. Perhaps Potter- 

Potter was at Hogwarts, and Dumbledore would not allow him to take to the field. 

"I wish to take the girl back." 

Potter had returned Diggory's body to Amos. 

"How dare Bella bring you with her!" Severus said finally, unearthing a flask of brandy, taking a long glug, before turning to stitch up the girl, neatening her of blood and afterbirth, to a modicum of presentability. "The last corpse I cleaned up was my mother's." 

Aunt Bella had not brought me along. I had been following the Greengrass girl. She must have been trying to get to her lover on the other side of the war. 

"I want the war over, Severus," I whispered, rocking the babe instinctively. 

"You and I, Draco," he said grimly. "Dumbledore cannot keep Potter placated any more. The boy will force the war to an end."

Potter was not given to inaction when others died for him.

"How is Voldemort?" Severus asked quietly. 

I shrugged. Nobody had seen him in weeks. 

We watched the conflagrations in the distance, as Aunt Bella led the Aurors on a chase through Glasgow. 

"I can take the babe to Hogwarts," he offered, bending from his reserve, ruffling my hair as he had once when I had been a little boy trailing him begging for CDs. 

In the distance, there rose Fiendfyre against the night's dark. Aunt Bella's signature exit. 

I did not pass the baby to Severus. 

"Draco, you cannot mean to keep the child!" he exclaimed. 

"It is hardly the worst decision made in this war," I murmured, dragging myself up. "Stay alive, Severus." 

He scowled and came to embrace me. 

"Don't splinch," he warned. 

I had splinched myself once, at fourteen. He had never let it go.

\------

"You cannot mean to keep the child!" Mum insisted. "You are not even seventeen, Draco!" 

"I won't have a child of my own," I said quietly. She fell silent. 

"Draco, my dearest, it isn't-" She wrung her hands, apologetic. "That my brokenness had never come to you." Before I could speak to her, she covered her face with a shaking hand and strode away. 

Exhausted from the day, I lay upon my bed, resting my head on an elbow, and turned to watch the sleeping child. 

\-----

"Draco." 

It was Voldemort. He stood on the threshold of my room. As Lily Potter had once, I gathered the babe to me instinctively. 

"May I come in?"

I nodded. What did refusing him serve? 

We got along, despite his wandering mind. I suspected he made the effort for Mum's sake. In his insanity, she was the only constant he knew to tether himself to. 

And Mum. Mum was the bravest woman I knew. _Narcissa's war_ , they said in hushed voices in the ranks. She was no duelist or politician, but she was hewn of resolve. 

"I was in Delphi," he said quietly, sitting at the foot of the bed, twining his hands and leaving them prominently in my line of sight. He was deliberate in reducing my anxiety by keeping his hands still and in my vision at all times. 

"Greece?" 

"Yes. There, the Oracle once sat on a seat of prophecy."

I did not hold with prophecy. Look at what soothsaying had done to him. 

"Did you find what you went looking for?"

Amusement softened his gaze. 

"Allow me," he said, and stretched out a hand to me. Frowning, and yet seeing no reason to be alarmed yet, I placed my right hand upon his palm. 

"Close your eyes." 

A vast, endless sweep of evergreen's velvet coiled about me, singing sweet hymns to love's mourning to a heart of gold buried under the Manor's hawthorn trees. Ancient and eternal, the magic of him was lullaby and power both. 

Startled, I opened my eyes. 

Nothing changed. 

Frowning, I moved my hand away from his. The soft rivulets of evergreen's lullaby ensconced me still. 

"I didn't need to keep my eyes closed," I muttered. 

"You are used to Severus's and Bella's tutelage. They are fond of infusing spectacle in demonstration."

In my acquaintance of him, spanning scant months, I knew him to be capable of keen observation. He was not empathetic, but he strived clumsily to apply his cutting perception to ease our interactions. The results were mixed. 

This magic that embraced me, muted wise in mourning's cloak, and yet incandescent in hope's resolve, spoke for him where his words could not serve. 

"You are healed," I whispered, disbelieving. "What did you do?"

"I made a pilgrimage to Delphi."

Mum had been the only one to hold faith that his mind could be restored. Even Aunt Bella had not nursed that hope. 

Having told me that, he fell into awkward silence. He was a poor conversationalist. Once, I had been told by Aunt Bella and Papa, Abraxas Malfoy had helped him hold his own in company, and the two of them had complemented each other seamlessly. 

He had come to me to tell me about his restored sanity. He had no cause to. I decided to make an offering of my own. 

"I have been busy too. I adopted a baby." 

His smile was a wry and wistful thing, a shy and artless quirk painted across his face. 

"In 1965, I came to this Manor with a child in tow. Abraxas made clear his exasperation, but he let me keep my foundling."

"Mum," I whispered. 

Thirty years ago, he had brought Mum here, after she had killed her father in self-defense, when she had been a girl of nine or ten. 

After his fall, after Abraxas's death, she had stayed in the Manor, preserving it as a mausoleum, walking among ghosts, and when Voldemort had returned, she had gone to war for him. 

"Did you know that she was-" 

I hesitated. The night's quiet and the divulgences he had made had brought to me unearned confidence in asking of matters best left alone. 

"You are, Draco," he said, seeing everything, even if he did not understand. I felt flayed, as I ever did, under his gaze. Flayed to the soul, and known and accepted, even if I was not understood. 

"I don't want to marry," I said fiercely, scooping the baby close. "I don't want children that way." 

"Neither Lucius nor Narcissa will require it of you," he pointed out. "If you mean to keep the child, you had best name him."

It was the first day of the Zodiacal month of Scorpio. 

"Scorpius." 

\------

Mum called us to dinner. Papa and Aunt Bella were there, as was Uncle Rodolphus. 

"Bella is pregnant," she informed us. 

"In the middle of a war!" Papa exclaimed. "Of all the reckless and foolish things you have undertaken, Bella!"

Aunt Bella was not the mothering sort. Was it the fear of imminent death that had motivated her to conceive? The prisoners of Azkaban were castrated, in keeping with Ministry policy. How had she-

"It was the only way," Mum cut in. 

Voldemort had needed a cause to regain his sanity. Mum and Aunt Bella had given him one, in a child of his own. He had given up ambition and vengeance, and had set the war aside, vanishing for weeks and months in a bid to find a semblance of lucidity to cling to before his child was born. 

"Cissy!" Papa said wanly. 

"It worked," I interrupted. "It worked. He is sane." 

I looked at Mum with new eyes. Voldemort had said that he had never won a game of chess since 1971. He had brought a child home once, and that child had become his sanctuary when he had lost even himself. 

"A hostage," Mum told Aunt Bella. "I want a political hostage. Then we can bring them to the negotiating table." 

"Cissy-" 

She had walked with the ghosts in this mausoleum since 1981, alone and warmed only by her faith in herself. 

"We shall end the war before Christmas," Mum promised. 

\-------

The Accord was signed on Christmas Eve, on a Tuesday. 

They divided the country into two, along the Anglo-Scottish line. Fudge took his government to Glasgow. Griselda came to London. Dumbledore returned to Hogwarts. Mum returned to Wiltshire. 

"To Belfast?" Papa asked me. 

"To London," I told him gently. "I bought a flat in Shoreditch." 

I meant to raise Scorpius away from them, away from the past. 

Aunt Bella and Uncle Rodolphus had purchased a small cottage in the Cotswolds, and meant to raise Delphini there. We did not want our children tainted by the griefs of our yesteryears. 

"Draco," Papa said, and shook his head, before coming to embrace me. "I am proud of you." 

I did not compare myself to Potter, or to anyone else, then. I knew I would not, ever again, in my life. I had my son. I had my peace. 

I was content. 

\------

"He means to leave for Swanage!" Mum said, exasperated. "How am I meant to keep him safe if he takes himself off to a seaside cottage in the middle of nowhere?"

"He is sane, Mum," I told her. "He doesn't need a minder."

Mum sat down heavily upon the bench that overlooked the blooms of hawthorns in her gardens. Against the ancient edifice of the manor, she was thin and small, and alone. Purpose had been her strength of years. 

"Mum." 

She looked at me. 

I knelt before her and clasped her hands in mine. 

"I am proud of you," I told her truthfully. "You are the reason why the next generation, on both sides of the wall, can have a future without the pall of war shadowing their childhoods." 

Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort had begun the war, and had caught four generations in its wretched clutches. A boy had grown up in a cupboard, and had returned from a graveyard, bloodied but unbroken, marked by a madman's scar. 

Mum had ended the war. 

Surrounding her, as warmth and affection, as gratitude and protection, was evergreen's magic. _Storge_ , I knew, was the love of a man for his family. 

"I am only a Floo away," I promised her. 

She ruffled my hair and kissed my brow. 

"What shall you do?" I asked, curiously. 

"Oh, I mean to pick up knitting."

I blinked at her. She had darned a madman's soul. Socks and bobbles seemed the right next step. 

* * *

_Shoreditch, 2005_

Delphini had run away from home. Perched at my kitchen high-stool, weeping into a bowl of ramen I had heated up for her, she was inconsolable. 

I gave up on feeding her and instead carried her to the sofa, where Scorpius was watching _Avatar_ for the umpteenth time. 

"What is that?" Delphini asked, distracted by Azula's lightning attack against poor Aang. 

"She is wicked cool!" Scorpius said enthusiastically. "She is like Aunt Bella, but better!" 

"Mum is the best duelist of the century!" Delphini retorted, and forgot her woe in squabbling. 

\-----

"Did you have to tell her now?" I asked Voldemort, exasperated and disgruntled. 

He was tearing up my fine Persian carpet with his frantic pacing. He had come to fetch the girl. I was in no mood to send her back with him. 

I was a boy parenting a boy, but I had at least a sense of what was age-appropriate information. 

Telling her of what he had done during the wars, and of how he had tried to kill a baby in its cradle, when she was eight-going-on-nine, was the cleverest idea he had had. 

"She needs to know," he held. 

I admired this in him. Once he had resolved to be her father, he had set aside pride and self-deception, and had offered himself to her unflinchingly and without facades.

However, a girl of eight-going-on-nine did not have the emotional resilience to understand what her father had been. 

"It could have waited for a few years." 

"I won't lie to her, Draco."

I scowled.  
  
"And I cannot have her hear of my past from anyone else," he continued, passionate as he defended his poor judgement. 

"Knowing you, I daresay you painted a bleak and grim picture," I muttered, weary. 

"I told her the truth."

There were many ways to tell a child the truth. He was observant, but had little empathy or sensitivity, despite his fumbling attempts to cultivate it in himself for the child's sake. His narration of this truth must have been cold and factual, shattering the girl's heart. 

She had idolized him. 

Then he stopped pacing, and I saw the marks of sleep-deprivation and fear stark on his features. 

"Go back to Swanage," I told him gently. "Let me see to this."

"Draco-" he began, and the plea in his voice was desperate. He crossed the distance between us and said quietly, "She-" 

She had run away from him. I did not blame her for it. His dry recounting of his past must have scared her out of her wits.   
  
"She is a sweet girl," I said, soothing. "Go back to Swanage. I will bring her to you when she is ready. She is safe here."

"I know that," he said irritably. "I know that she is safe with you. I know that she would have come to you. As a bird to a lighthouse."

"You came to me," I pointed out. 

As a bird to a lighthouse. My grandfather once, and then my mother afterwards, and then I, had become his lighthouse, where he turned to in times of desperation or defeat. 

"Go on," I told him again. 

He sighed, and left without saying a word more. 

He trusted me to repair what he had shattered. 

Twenty-five, and I had two children in my tiny flat watching _Avatar_. 

Contentment washed over me as I took in the sight of them, rapt in wide-eyed wonder, as they watched the cartoon. 

I could not bring myself to rue my fate.   
  
\------

> There lived a tailor who had only one son, and he was extremely small, not larger than your thumb, and so was called Tom Thumb. 

"Papa, how could that be?" Scorpius demanded to know, little skeptic that he was. 

"Hush," I chided him. 

I was seated upon my bed, a child pillowed into my body on either side, and I had been reading to them a nighttime's story. 

> However, he was a courageous fellow, and he told his father, "Papa, I am determined to go out into the world to seek my fortune." 

"Is that why you came to London, Papa?" Scorpius pestered, eyes wide in curiosity. 

Delphini was unusually silent. 

"Do you like the tale, Delphini?"

"It is better than what Papa reads to me," she muttered, scowling. 

"What does he read to you?" Scorpius queried. "Poetry?"

"The Conquest of Bread!" she lamented. 

I raised my eyebrows but refrained from critique. What if she grew up to be a savant economist? 

Hushing their chatter, I returned to the tale of brave Tom Thumb. Scorpius nodded off against my side, and began snoring. Delphini was wan and quiet. 

I had come to the end of the tale.

> "Papa, why did you give the wicked fox all the hens in your yard?"
> 
> "Don't you think that I would rather have you with me than all the hens in my yard and the riches in my house?"

"He was telling me the truth, wasn't he?" she said finally. 

I caressed her curly mop of hair. Sniffling, she turned to press her face into my chest, and muttered, "He wasn't lying. He never lies." 

"Harry didn't deserve it," she said vehemently, looking up with reddened eyes and a quavering lip. 

"No, Delphini, he did not deserve any of it," I concurred, smoothing her brow. 

"Then why-" she began to cry softly, attempting to not disturb her sleeping cousin. "Why did Papa do that?" 

"He wasn't well, your Papa, for the longest time," I said gently. 

"Then what happened?" 

"Then he had you. He healed himself." 

"Why didn't he do it before?" 

"Because he couldn't. When you aren't well of mind, Delphini, there is nothing you can truly do. His love for you did the impossible."

She peered at me suspiciously. These two little skeptics burrowed close to me. Emotion overwhelmed me for an instant, but I managed to rein it in, to be the girl's anchor. 

"When I grow up, I will learn to heal," she swore. 

I bent to kiss her tear-sheened cheek. 

"Draco?"

"Yes?" 

"I asked Papa if Harry Potter will hate me, because I have a home and a family," she said in a whisper. "Papa said that Harry will not hate a child for her father's sin."

"Potter-" I shook my head, seeing her confusion. "Harry is a good and kind man, Delphini. He does not hate anyone."

"I want to be like him," she admitted. 

"You are, sweet child. You are."

Potter had been touched by melancholy, as a child. While he had never been one to hold grudges, he had been an outcast, looking in. 

Abraxas Malfoy had been the first to give a foundling sanctuary.

Mum had won his war and given Voldemort a cause to return to reason, by binding him down with child.   
  
And to me had come this child, seeking to forgive her father, wanting to know about his victim. 

I had been a lonely boy. Potter, even among his friends, had not truly been one of them. 

Voldemort, after all these years, was as driftwood, tethered only by _Storge_ , by the love of a man for his family. 

Mum was lonely in that mausoleum she dwelt in.

Saturn's children, all of us, stamped by melancholy. Saturn had held sway over my family long enough. 

I hugged Scorpius and Delphini to me. These two, I promised silently, would never know loneliness. Theirs would not be the lot of outcasts, drifting without belonging. 

\-------

"You did not have to take her in," Mum said kindly, as I took tea with her in the manor. "Send her along to me."

She would not come to London. I suspected that she did not bestir herself from the mausoleum to venture anywhere other than Swanage, and that was only since Voldemort was more of a recluse than even her. 

"Scorpius is glad for company," I said truthfully. "She is no trouble at all, Mum."

"An odd notion, considering her mother," Mum muttered. "Bella was an unruly child." 

Aunt Bella had not necessarily damped down her unruliness with time. She was unapologetically herself, and being herself meant crowing in pride about all the buildings in Glasgow she had blown up with Fiendfyre. 

"I think she takes after him," I stated. 

Mum hummed, tight-lipped and protective as ever when it came to guarding Voldemort's past. 

"The Ecumenical Good," she said then. "Albus Dumbledore once endorsed the Greater Good. You are practicing the Ecumenical Good."

"Whatever is that?" I asked Mum, laughing at the ponciness she affected. 

"Universal good, Draco," she said, raising her teacup to me. 

Delphini forgiving Voldemort and returning to him was indeed the right thing to do for ensuring The Ecumenical Good. There was no war left in any of us. Anchoring Voldemort with family was perhaps a cop-out solution, but we had made it work for years. Dumbledore's solution had been to go to war. Mum had managed to end the war without blowing up the country. 

I had not taken in Delphini for the Ecumenical Good. I loved the child. And after all these years, I had come to accept that Voldemort was family, and in his own clumsy and artless way, he had fostered a rapport with me.

"If I am practicing the Ecumenical Good, Mum, I know where I learned it from," I teased her, raising my teacup to her in turn. 

"Keepers of the Flame of the Ecumenical Good, you and I," Mum said blithely. 

I clinked my teacup to hers in salute. 

\-----


End file.
